Quirky, Kooky, and Off-Beat Nonprofit Marketing and Fundraising

I’m hosting this month’s Nonprofit Blog Carnival, where the theme is quirky, kooky, and off-beat nonprofit marketing and fundraising ideas.

It’s time to get creative, people.

I promise, you really can do something a little different that grabs people’s attention, while still staying true to your mission. We’ve got plenty of examples to prove it! In fact, I received more suggestions that I could include in this post and still keep it relatively manageable.

If I had to pick one subsector of the nonprofit world that does some really creative marketing, I’d have to pick local animal shelters and humane societies. Yeah, yeah, I hear you, they have cute puppies and kittens threatened with lethal injection (and worse). But they have A LOT of them, so marketing is still hard work, even with easy pictures and stories. The ASCPApro blog, Shelter’s Edge, highlights many of these campaigns on a regular basis. (ASPCApro has compiled a Little Black Book of Adoption Promotions that’s full of nonprofit marketing ideas that can be translated to other fields too.)

Claire Morgan, a social media intern with Building Tomorrow, which builds schools in Uganda, created a rap video to Salt-n-Pepa’s “Shoop” which is Ellen DeGeneres’ favorite song, asking for Ellen’s support and to gain Twitter followers. “We haven’t heard from Ellen yet, but we have gotten a lot of positive feedback and even hosted a #BTweetathon to talk about the video and our cause,” says Claire. “The video was bold and definitely kooky, but also extremely successful in generating buzz about a worthy cause.”